Visiting Minatojima

Minatojima is Port Island, we live at. It seems like a mixture of a residential and industrial area. Many large buildings with either a company name on it (industry) or individual units on each floor (residential). The train helps people to get to the mainland and there is the problem we experience now: there are no restaurants and lively areas on the island.

Without a breakfast at 14:00, we were hungry and Lukas had no bedding equipment at all (no sheets, no blanket, only a small pillow). Time to go shopping! Talking to a Finnish resident (who confirmed that staying 1 year abroad is much better than 6 months), we asked for restaurant recommendations. He hesitated to mention anything specific and recommended restaurants at the mainland. But we just arrived from the mainland and wanted to discover Minatojima. Martina and I started going along in a random direction.

Seven Eleven is one popular convenience store for foreigners, because the ATM machines work with foreign ATM cards. We looked at it, but wanted to find a restaurant. We gave up after some more 10 minutes. We recognized that we won’t find a restaurant at this island. Going back a similar way, we came across Seven Eleven again and grabbed some snacks (2 rise balls and a bread with corn) with water. Whereas I consumed my items immediately, Martina was required to warm up her rice ball first. We also reached IKEA. Yes, the swedish furniture company is also popular in Japan. We saw the IKEA store already from the train. We wanted to get some bedding equipment and decided to do it immediately. As it turns out we did not know the measurements of our bed and Lukas hesitated to estimate them (which was the right decision by the way). But we got a general idea what IKEA offers. I jokingly said "Well, IKEA offers something to eat in Austria" and, yes, in Japan too. We considered it for dinner. We headed back to the Residence and put our remaining items into the fridge.

At 16:00 one of three orientations per day for arriving students take place. We joined at 16:00; together with 2 girls and the German we met at the train station. We got information on how to write our address, open the post box, do the laundry and how to handle garbage. We also got an idea of the important rooms in the building. Yes, the water is clean and drinkable, though I need to point out that you can smell and taste chlorine, which I am not used to as Austrian. No, visitors are not allowed though if we ask beforehand he might make an exception.

It was the first time, I said Hi online, because accidently my eduroam configuration from Austria works in Japan as well. We will receive our own WiFi password on Monday.